Colocation Failures and Your Solution to Regain IT Resilience

During the summer of 2023, I felt like the lookout of HMS Titanic, staring at an iceberg in the distance.

I’d discovered all the lovely standards issued by colocation providers to verify proper maintenance and cybersecurity measures are in place… ?are fraudulent.? I detailed exactly why that is so, ?ISO 14001, ISO 9001, SOC 1 Type II and SOC 2, in “SOC-2, The Certification of Quality That Isn’t.”??

I also knew that the electrical grid for the entire country were being strained, and that the logical outcome would be rolling blackouts, testing the poorly maintained critical infrastructure of colocation companies, leading to massive unplanned outages which could affect thousands of large companies that depend on them for their continued existence.? And their clients- you and I, as individuals- would be exposed to those same risks.

The scope of the problem is simple to describe:

Every large company, in every business sector, is at risk.

I was faced with the choice of staying in my cushy little corporate job (working at the office three days per week), or step into the unknown, and start my own company.? I chose the latter.

I have two primary goals:

1.????? Raise awareness of the issue, so that C-suite executives can make informed command decisions as to how to proceed, and

2.????? If they choose to implement a program to guarantee their IT assets are secure, hopefully they’ll reach out to Amerruss; we’re the only company in the world with a proven solution.

Up to this point, I have had limited success in raising awareness of how many of the colocation companies are utterly wretched in their maintenance practices.?

The published investigation by Hindenburg Research is changing all that.? I urge you to carefully read it; it’s long, but it makes the situation extremely clear.

Here are some choice quotes from it:

When Equinix transitioned to become a REIT in 2015, it began using AFFO as a key metric in determining executive bonuses. That same year, Equinix reported a sudden 47% drop in maintenance CapEx, leading to an estimated 19% boost to reported AFFO.

One former data center manager said they felt squeezed by “operationally focused accountants”: “They would assess all our expenses versus our recurring CapEx… [They were] always trying to squeeze your expenses, your OpEx, because it was ‘dirty spend’.”

Generally, as physical assets like data centers get older, maintenance costs increase.?

Contrary to this basic physical reality, Equinix’s maintenance CapEx significantly?declined?as a percentage of revenue over the past decade, from 9.3% in 2014 to 2.7% in 2023, despite its facilities aging.?[10]

An engineer who worked at Equinix’s large Secaucus data center in the US, which was built in 2006, told us: “you would be amazed at the amount of equipment that goes offline, needs to be repaired”.

I wouldn’t be amazed.? I already knew.

I had audited a variety of facilities for over six years, and that included many Equinix sites.? The case study of the program development, deployment, lessons learned and takeaways, are fully documented in?“Beyond Compliance: Vanguard’s Journey to Perfect Uptime.”?

At the time I wrote the case-study, I was aware of Equinix’s failings for two years.? But if I were to “name names,” it would put me in legal jeopardy, despite the things being true; one man against an $80 Billion company, makes for slim odds, if you don’t have deep pockets to defend yourself.

So I wrote several essays that demonstrate how the colocation industry really works, for enterprise IT clients:

The 2024 Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis, and Why Data Centers Aren't as Reliable as You Think

Fight Club's Echo: How Colocation SLAs Mask Risks and Our Strategy to Counter Them

Shattering the Illusion: Maintenance MIS-Management is the #1 Cause of Data Center Outages

And I’ll leave you with this observation:? if Equinix slashed their maintenance expenditures nine years ago, and you have comments from people inside the company about equipment being offline or broken, is this not proof-positive that the SOC-2 is a fraud, along with all the other lovely certificates issued by CPAs? ?

If the company has been inadequately maintaining their mission-critical facilities for nine years, do you really believe your IT assets are being adequately supported?

The answer is, “of course not.”?

What Happens Now???

You’re now faced with a difficult choice between two very unhappy options:

1.????? Find another colocation company (with no way to know if the replacement will improve the situation), and pay tens- if not hundreds- of millions of dollars to make this happen.

2.????? Stay with Equinix and hope things somehow improve before your IT presence is lost because of poorly maintained infrastructure.? “Hope” is not much of a plan.

But there IS another option: implement a comprehensive resilience program that:

1.????? Analyzes all systems that support your equipment to verify you have proper infrastructure to support your IT equipment,

2.????? Verifies maintenance calendars are proper and implemented accordingly, and

3.????? Then reviews maintenance reports, in an on-going basis, to make sure you have NO risks to your equipment, or developing situations which may put your equipment at risk in the future.

THIS is the Amerruss Resilience Program; a scalable, replicable, systematic approach to insure your assets are FULLY protected.?

Colocation companies will always say “we can’t guarantee 100% availability.” Of course, they can’t even guarantee meeting their own tier uptime, either.? And when they “miss,” they offer you credits…? for more of the same.

Amerruss CAN guarantee your uptime SLAs; we warranty our work.? In other words, we will deliver what the colocation companies only pretend to deliver.?

We’re the ONLY company in the world to make such an audacious claim.

We’re THE solution to the colocation problem you face.